Alderney Roman Fort

Alderney is one of the Channel Islands, little bits of British territory off the French coast. Alderney boasts one town and a bunch of old fortifications. These include an Elizabethan fort (above),

a substantial set of forts and batteries built in the 1800s, 

and several concrete blockhouses built by the Nazis. 

All of which was probably a waste of time, because most experts who have looked at the place have deemed it fundamentally indefesible:

The island was never able to effectively defend itself and survived attack mainly from being too poor and insignificant to be worth the expense of raiding. 

Gladstone dismissed the 19th-century plan of fortification as

a monument of human folly, useless to us...but perhaps not absolutely useless to a possible enemy, with whom we may at some period have to deal and who may possibly be able to extract some profit in the way of shelter and accommodation from the ruins

The WW II Allies simply ignored the place, leaving its very hungry defenders to surrender at the end of the war.

But besides all those well documented forts, there is this thing, known as The Nunnery. What is it?

Well, it looks like a Roman fort, albeit with a few later additions. The stonework seems Roman, and the shape closely resembled the four Roman "signal stations" along the east coast of Yorkshire. But the walls of those signal stations survive to about knee height. Who ever heard of a Roman fort with standing walls 18 feet high?

Debate about the site therefore raged for more than 150 years.

Excavations carried out in 2008 to 2011 finally nailed the site's origin: Roman artifacts found around the foundation confirm that it is indeed a Roman fort. It now bills itself the best preserved Roman fort in Britain.

Elizabethan records describe a tall tower standing in the center of the fort, but that disappeared before any archaeologist got a good look at it. But they did find the foundations, which showed that this tower was pretty big, leading them to reconstruct it like this. I don't know how could you tell from the foundations that the walls went straight up, rather than some sort of pyramid? But anyway this is the official interpetation.

I learned about this from a sort of New Year's best wishes email I received from a regular reader of this blog who lives in Alderney. I loved learning about Alderney, and I love knowing that I have readers around the world.

Youth in America

Remarkabke article by Kelsey Piper at The Argument. She begins with some research done in 1913 by journalist Helen Todd, who interviewed young teenagers working in factories:

Todd asked these teenage laborers whether they would choose work in the factory or school if their families were rich enough that they didn’t need to work. Overwhelmingly, they chose the factory:

“The children don’t holler at ye and call ye a Christ-killer in a factory.”

“They don’t call ye a Dago.”

“They’re good to you at home when you earn money.” . . .

“Yer folks don’t hit ye so much.”

“You can buy shoes for the baby.”

“You can give your mother yer pay envelop.” . . .

“When my brother is fourteen, I’m going to get him a job here. Then, my mother says, we’ll take the baby out of the ‘Sylum for the Half Orphans.”

How things have changed in a century.

These days, according to Piper, the biggest threat to young people is not dangerous factory work or extreme poverty, but restrictive parenting:

This month, The Argument polled voters about modern parenting. I found it striking how far our society has pushed back the age at which children are trusted with even the barest autonomy — or, from another angle, how many years we expect parents to dedicate all their time to closely supervising them. 

We asked “At what age do you think it is appropriate for a child to stay home alone for an hour or two?” To my astonishment, 36% of respondents said that it was not appropriate until “between the ages of 14 and 17.”

Piper at first assumed that those must be people without children, but no; there wasn't much difference between people with and without children.

Or this:

Or take the responses to another question we asked: “When parents allow a 10-year-old child to play alone in a nearby park for three hours, should they be investigated by Child Protective Services for potential neglect?” Again, 36% of respondents said that they should.

She has lots more data of this sort.

I found that we had the opposite issue in my family. I kept encouraging my children to go out and play, but they preferred to stay inside and watch television or play video games. None of my children ever rode a bike, despite all the time I put into teaching and encouraging them.

But anyway it appears to be true that Americans under 18 spend a lot less time out on their own these days than they used to. We have good data on how many teenagers work, and that number is way down.

What impact is this having?

I confess that I have no idea. But maybe some of the despair that young people seem to feel about their own futures stems from their lack of experience at making their way in the world.

How to Begin an Academic Paper

Candidate for the best first paragraph of an economics paper, from a paper on round numbers in auctions by Adriaan Soetevent:

In perhaps the most notorious auction in history, after murdering the emperor in 193 CE, praetorian soldiers offered the entire Roman Empire to the highest bidder. Commentators since Klemperer and Temin (2001) have found Julianus' winning bid of 25,000 sesterces per soldier remarkable for various reasons: its sheer size (exceeding one billion current dollars), its enormous jump over the previous bid (20,000 offered by Sulpicianus), and its ultimate futility (Julianus only reigned as emperor for two months before being murdered himself). What has gone unremarked is that both Sulpicianus' and Julianus' bids are round numbers.

Night Drawings by Rembrandt

The Flight into Egypt. All of these were done to be reproduced as prints.

The Presentation in the Temple

The Adoration of the Shepherds

St. Jerome in a Dark Chamber

The Practicing Alchemist

A Russian Report from the Front Lines

Via Andrew Perpetua:

December 2025 , Kramatorsk District, Donetsk People's Republic, Russia.

24 hours of war.

We're advancing, but the cost of these advances is only increasing.

Bringing fighters into the area has become even more difficult—the enemy controls the entire sky to a significant depth.

Now, we can only bring them in one at a time, and only on foot—it's not a guarantee, but the only solution. Going in two at a time means zero chance.

The approach is divided into several stages and stretches over two days of walking for one attacker.

From the moment the attacker begins his advance toward the front line, he is accompanied by our drone, which monitors the air situation and provides direction if the fighter starts to wander.

The concentration of enemy drone operators in the area is off the charts.

Last night, the enemy simultaneously launched seventeen FPVs against one fighter. Every one reached the objective.

After the first FPV arrived, the fighter began providing self-help with his first aid kit. But then sixteen more arrived immediately. This happened as the fighter was crossing a small river—he'll likely never be found.

The neighbors [adjacent Russian unit] are lying. They entered the first house on the outskirts of the village, but claimed that they had occupied the entire first street in the village.

Our troops advanced along this street, and as early as the third house from the edge, the houses came under enemy fire. The price of lies has once again become a reality in the fighters' lives.

This morning, another fighter tried to move into position. But the enemy spotted him, too. First, two FPVs, and then a Vampire with mines.

The unit has only one Mavic. We can't ram the enemy—there are no more birds, and we won't be able to guide fighters, track the enemy, or generally manage the battle. We also don't have fiber optic FPV.

Yes, the unit that's first on the ground has no birds. . . .

The soldiers are wondering: why does the Ministry of Defense prefer to pay colossal sums of compensation for the deaths of soldiers, when saturating the sector with fiber optics (on the ground, not in reports) could save soldiers' lives and colossal budgetary sums?

The answers will probably come later—in new high-profile corruption cases. But the soldiers' lives will never be brought back.

Perpetua recently reported video evidence for 369 Russians being killed in one day, with an average of 174/day during December.

The Reading Debate Makes Me Crazy

This is what I believe about the teaching of reading:

1. For the students who have the most trouble learning, whether because they come from deprived environments or are just slow, a highly structured phonics curriculum works best.
2. Everyone else, including teachers and smart kids, hates highly structured phonics and finds it deadly boring. A majority of children learn to read easily no matter what method you use.

So the arguments being tossed around by both sides of the phonics vs. "whole language" debate are, in fact, all simultaneously true. Structured phonics generates the highest overall reading scores and helps the largest number of children learn to read – this is the basis of the "Mississippi miracle" and all other such gains. BUT it also drives high teacher turnover and may be one of the factors that leads many smart children to hate school and find it an utter bore.

The obvious solution, to me, is to stop forcing all students to take the same curriculum. Then you could rotate the assignments among the teachers so none of them have to teach phonics every year for decades. Is that really so hard? Apparently it is. 

There is also one other tried, tested, and proven way to help slow learners master reading, which is personal attention from an adult who cares. This is how I taught my eldest son (a severe ADHD case) to read. But this is very expensive and not really an option for most school systems.

The way people involved in this debate shout past each other is a marvel to behold.

The House of the Birds

The House of the Birds is a Roman villa near Seville in Spain. This was the Roman colony of Italica, founded after the war with Hannibal as a settlement of veterans. Archaeological excavation of the site began in 1810. 

The House of the Birds had several fine mosaics but is best known for this one, depicting 33 different species.

Mallard duck

Sparrow

Pigeon

Parrot

Heron

Owl

Peacock

The New Manichaeanism

Cass Sunstein reviews Laura Field's Furious Minds: 

The deeper and more specific problem, at least to me, is the pervasiveness of the Manichaean sensibility. It’s harsh. It’s contemptuous. It’s ugly. It’s horrible. It’s sneering. It’s vicious. (It feels as if it has something like murder on its mind.) . . .

Because the New Right is striking such a nerve, it must be onto something. But what? One answer is a sense, on the part of many, that political elites have contempt for them. Another is a sense that longstanding sources of identity, pride, and self-respect (including patriotism) are under assault. In important respects, North America and Europe are indeed ailing. Patrick Deneen is entirely right to emphasize the importance of traditions, norms, virtues, values, and faith. But in my view, members of the New Right are least convincing when they argue that some abstraction called “liberalism” is responsible for the demise of those things. Liberalism is not a person or a thing; it is not Voldemort. When traditions and norms are at risk, it would be good to focus less on high-falutin’ claims about what abstractions do, and to explore, in a more systematic way, what kinds of economic, technological, and cultural forces have been at work, and how best to respond to them.

What Field captures beautifully is that notwithstanding the immense diversity of the members of the New Right, they are unified by one thing: a Manichaean sensibility, a sense that the forces of darkness are assembled against the forces of light. For many members of the New Right, the Manicheanism is like a form of chanting, almost hallucinatory, a prelude to something. It’s the Two Minutes Hate. It’s primal.

I feel the same. As I have said several times, what I keep hearing from MAGA folks is not really that Trump's policies are good, but that they are necessary to defend the nation from the ultimate horror building on the left.

I keep thinking that at least some of these folks just want to fight, and since they have no real enemies they have turned a bunch of two-bit anarchists and woke professors into a menace comparable to Stalinism.

Phoebe Anna Traquair, "The Progress of the Soul"

Tapestries, 1899-1902. The Entrance.

The Stress.

Despair.

Victory. In the National Gallery of Scotland.

Girls, Screens, Parents, and Happiness

Interesting study looked at how the happiness of girls was related to multiple variables, including how much time they spend on their phones and how much they communicate with their parents. The investigators did not find that spending a lot of time on screens had much impact by itself. Instead they found a much bigger effect from whether girls said they could talk to their parents about their problems.

Parent-child communication dominates the model . . . .

Phones do matter, but their role is often misunderstood. Instead of operating as a primary source of distress, heavy phone use appears to function as a compensatory behavior. When young people lack reliable sources of support or connection, they turn to tools that provide stimulation or regulation. Heavy screen use fills gaps left by unmet material and psychological needs. 

My question would be, why don't some girls think they can talk to their parents? Is that based entirely on the strength of the relationship, or does it depend on what their problems are? If you are so involved in online life that most of your problems are online, and you know your parents frown on that, does that keep you from talking to them about it? I don't see these as independent variables.

Derek Thomapson and Ezra Klein, "Abundance"

Well, that was a fun Christmas gift.

Abundance (2025) is a hymn to the high-tech, eco-friendly future we can have if only we adopt the authors' political prescriptions. It begins by describing this future, in which we zoom around in electric, self-driving cars and supersonic airplanes, eating factory-grown meat and vegetables grown hydroponically in nearby towers, drinking desalinated seawater and treating all possible diseases and addictions with drone-delivered meds manufactured in low-earth orbit. Improved food production allows us to rewild vast areas that are now farms or ranches, while desalination allows us to let rivers run free. Because of AI and other technologies, most people enjoy all this while working only a few days a week. Sounds great!

The authors state their thesis at the beginning: "scarcity is a choice." Actually, though, they devote just as much attention to a separate thesis: that there is no conflict between economic growth and preserving the environment. In fact, they argue, in order to protect the environment we need a lot more economic growth. We need green energy, a vastly expanded electrial grid, and billions of new, electrically-powered machines. The biggest threat to a green future, in their view, is anti-growth politics.

Most of the book is an analysis what we need to do to get this transformation. The discussion is interesting, but it is mostly at what I would call a middle level. For example, DT and EK spend a lot of time on the troubles with NEPA, and this discussion is valuable. NEPA was passed in an era of air and water pollution that was nightmarish by out standards, when the actions needed to clean up the planet seemed pretty straightforward. But in our world,

these well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects neeeded in the twenty-first. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the condequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. (5)

The problem with NEPA is not really the law as written. As I have written here before, the texts reads as pretty reasonable and sensible. The problem is that it gives people a way to file lawsuits against any project they oppose. This is an almost uniquely Americn problem; nowhere else in the world do citizens file nearly as many lawsuits against their own government. As the authors note, the result is that decisions that in most of the world are made by bureaucrats end up being made by judges. So NEPA, an instrument designed to protect the environment, has ended up hamstringing the government. One reason Republicans have never tried to repeal it is that it gives their own supporters a way to fight Democratic priorities:

Over the ourse of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.

One way to think about our highly bureaucratic, schlerotic system is to look at what we can do when we cast all the rules and limits aside. DT and EK talk up Governor Shapiro's rapid restoration of I-95 through Philadelphia after a damaging fire, which was all done as an "emergency," without any environmental review or competitive bidding. They also tout the Operation Warp Speed program to develop Covid-19 vaccines.

DT and EK devote a whole chapter to housing supply, and that is the main way their arguments have entered the discourse. I have already written about this part of the issue, so I won't belabor it again. But I think that saying "less zoning, more housing" is no kind of solultion; the successful French and British new urbanist projects I have written about here emerged from careful planning, not just changing the zoning laws.

Abundance also covers the "crisis" in scientific funding, which I have written about extensively (here, here, here). They make the usual complaints and recommendations that I consider shallow, e.g., that we don't fund enough younger scientists, when insiders will tell you that the last thing we want to do is to make young, highly productive scientists into grant recipients, which forces them to be mainly administrators. They complain at length about the refusal of grant-making bodies to fund mRNA research, but 1) this is wrong, tons of mRNA research was funded, and 2) sure, some great projects don't get funded because scientific funding is a human endeavor and therefore imperfect. It is points like this that always make me suspicious of grand, far-reaching plans; if you make a hundred points and are wrong about one of the few I know anything about, what does that say about the rest of your points?

Ok, fine, I don't know anyone who doesn't think the US is over-bureaucratized, lawsuit ridden, and too slow to do important things.

But I am interested in a deeper level of thinking about these problems: why do Americans want to hamstring their government? 

Because we do not trust our government. And to me that is another way of saying that we do not trust each other.

That, to me, is the real issue: we have no vision of the future that a majority of Americans share. For my whole life I have watched our government hatch schemes for making the country better, and then watched the people rise up against them. I was born too late for the great era of America doing things, which stretched from the 1840s to the 1960s: railroads, telegraph lines, power stations and electric lines, skyscrapers, pipelines, dams, roads, a vast array of new factories. Whole new cities. The Moon landings. I was born into the reaction against all of that. Baltimore was in the forefront of fighting the Interstate Highway System, and eventually succeeded in keeping I-70 and I-83 out of downtown. The same thing happened in Washington and many other places, and much of the system as imagined was never built. Then came the environmental movement, which I think was a great thing but often took the form of attacking the infrastructure we had just built. The expansion of nuclear power was shut down.

Then we had school busing, which turned a nation already on edge over desegration into a lava lake of resentment against "social engineering." Lately we have had rage against "gentrification."

Plus we have had two generations of architects determined to force modernism down our throats, even though a large majority hates it. I think it would be much easier to build things if architects hadn't forgotten how to make them attractive.

Here's a parable: in the 1930s, New Deal Progressives expelled people they considered materially and spiritually impoverished from thousands of places in America to create the TVA and many of our National Parks. In the 1980s both the parks and the TVA launched programs to record the memories of those who had been expelled, resulting in a great trove of oral history, and now they have dozens of exhibits devoted to the lives of those who were expelled. In working on this I have met people who are still mad about the expulsion of their ancestors, 75 years later, and do not in any way think that the creation of the National Park system, or the electrification of the Tennessee basin justifies what was done to their families.

I don't think DT and EK's vision will fail because of bureaucracy or NEPA or lawsuits; it will fail because the nation is not united behind their vision. Everything they propose is controversial. I think lab-grown meat would be great, but tens of millions of Americans would fight any attempt to end ranching, quite likely with guns. A shift from surface agriculture, some of it still done by family farms, to corporate-owned hydroponics towers would also be widely opposed. (Imagine all the ways the organic, anti-GM crowd will find to worry about hydroponics towers.) We already see bitter opposition to the phasing out of coal mining, complete with accusations of cultural genocide, and if anybody moves against oil drilling that would be even worse.

Everybody involved in firefighting or forest management says we need to do more controlled burns across the West, but every plan to do so is fought like hell by the residents. In a democracy, who has the right to tell them they are wrong?

So, yeah, it's stupid that we hold up solar farms for NEPA review, and stupid that Trump's crew thinks wind farms are a woke conspiracy. But this is a democracy, and it is very, very hard to do anything that 50 million people oppose, especially when those opponents include the neighbors.

One of my children asked me if solving our housing problems would be harder or easier than getting to the Moon, and I said getting to the Moon is much easier. There's nobody in the way who has to be moved.

At an even deeper level, I am not at all sure that humans would cope very well with no longer having to work to stay alive. Even though I am something of a rationalist, the sort of ultra-clean, hydroponics towers, desalinated seawater, all electric future they imagine makes my skin crawl. And without a future that a majority of people can get excited about, big changes will not happen.

Matthew Walther on MAGA and its Strange Children

From an essay in the NY Times about MAGA's infighting and other troubles:

The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune. The disappearance of the informal gate-keeping function once performed by conservative luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr. is probably permanent. In the absence of such authority, informed argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering, self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.

Links 26 December 2025

Sword hilt from Sri Lanka, 18th century

Interesting review of Agnes Callard's new book about Socrates. From Henry Oliver, who reads widely and posts numerous reviews.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Grizzly finds at a Bronze Age burial site in Scotland.

Paul Krugman on "Trump's Manufacturing Misfire."

Fairburn Tower, a 16th-century Scottish tower house turned into a modern vacation home. (2-minute video, article, property web site, detailed 43-minute video about the restoration)

Freddie deBoer gripes that negative criticism of pop culture seems to be disappearing before trashing the latest season of Stranger Things: "Nerds are not marginalized in 2025! We live under the thumb of the ever-growing nerd empire!"

The Harvard Crimson has a great piece on what happened to the Harvard Salient, a student-run conservative magazine that collapsed after their board saw conversations in which writers defended quoting Hitler, called for mass execution of immigrants, defended the Spanish Inquisition, and so on.

Focus group with conservative young men does not find them upset about the economy or their own prospects. (TwitterX)

Metal detectorists find five Anglo-Saxon jewels in Lincolnshire, quite lovely.

The Roman mosaic dubbed the "flowered carpet", which was reburied after excavation to preserve it, has been uncovered again.

Summary of what happened when St. Paul enacted rent control but Minneapolis did not. (Twitter/X)

Beachy Head Woman, a skeleton from Roman Britain, was thought to be from sub-Saharan Africa based on skull measurements, but now DNA says she was British. DNA has made conclusions from skeleton measurements even more questionable, including conclusions about sex. I think we should stop paying any attention to them.

Did Asgard archaea gave rise to eukaryotes?

French boys named "Kevin" and the populist right. (Twitter/X)

Study of caste discrimination by foreign multinationals hiring in India. Most of it occurs at the interview level. (Paper, summary on TwitterX) There is lots of data out there showing that interviews are useless. I would say that is because most interviewers have no idea what to ask, but I allow the possibility that I don't, either.

Against "Heritage Americans": "The idea that we should respect someone more because of what their ancestor 12 generations ago did is part of what we fought a revolution against." Sean Trende on Twitter/X.

The secret laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York where financier Alfred Loomis did cutting edge scientific research in his spare time.

Book carving is back.

One of the most interesting parties in America seems to be the annual Surreal Salon hosted by Baton Rouge Galleries. 2025, 2026, article at This is Colossal.

The rock crystal jar from the Galloway hoard is all cleaned up and on display.

The War Zone on Trump's battleships, notes that the Navy has been floating concepts for an "arsenal ship" since the 90s. And Sandboxx with an interesting 30-minute video.

Are large ground armies obsolete in the age of drones? (15-minute video)

Requiem for the stage: "the last great Broadway season was 1957-1958".

Magyar's Birds, the top Ukrainian drone unit, posts a claim that when the Russians attacked with  armored vehicles, plus numerous ATVs and motorcycles, they knocked out 29 armored vehicles and stopped the attack "within 100 minutes." The front lines in Ukraine are a brutal hellscape where nothing that makes itself visible survives for long.

Kwame Anthony Appiah on Philosophy, Toleration, and Identity

I think Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the wisest people in the world. In this interview with the Chronicle, he touches on many hot button topics in what seem to me highly sensible ways.

On tolerance in the university:

I would like to be at a university where we can talk to each other across differences of politics and religion and national origin and sexuality and all the things that sometimes divide us. That is something that a liberal education is likely to encourage.

Of course, if you have a bad experience in the course of your liberal education, you may want to hide away in the community that makes you happy. But if we do it right, we should make these attitudes attractive. That’s not because I’m a relativist. Some of the attitudes that we need to be engaged with are wrong, whether they’re about facts or norms. But as a social matter, we are a diverse society. This was the central presupposition of Rawls’s theory of justice: We have to accept that we live in a society which has a diversity of what he called “reasonable conceptions of the good life.” Being willing to live side by side with people isn’t the same as thinking that they’re right.

When my very devout Muslim uncle had us over for meals at Eid, he was indifferent to the question of whether our Christianity or his Islam was correct. When his children came to us for Christmas, we didn’t think, “You can’t talk to these people. They’re wrong about Jesus.” Intellectuals find it hard to combine thinking it’s very important that something is true with being perfectly happy to hang out with people who don’t believe it. But that’s an important human skill because diversity isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

On trigger warnings:

In an inevitably plural society, one of the things a person growing up needs to acquire is skin thickness. So I don’t think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself for a happy life. . . . At the beginning of most of my classes, I tell students that if someone says something that upsets you, assume they didn’t mean to. . . .

So while we need to create a welcoming atmosphere in the classroom — not because that’s our job, but because it’s necessary in order to do our job — these supposedly protective measures have not really helped. They’ve made a lot of people unwilling to raise questions because they don’t know whether they’ll be punished in some way or ostracized.

On free speech and the US first amendment:

My attitude to giving the government the power to regulate speech is not that there aren’t imaginable circumstances in which, all things considered, it might be good to do. It’s just that, if you give governments that power, overwhelmingly, they will use it in bad cases. That’s the history. . . .

Any regime has costs as well as benefits. You can harm someone by using certain words. I don’t deny that. But the question is whether giving the state the power to decide which words those are. That’s not something I’m inclined to be optimistic about. When I was eight, my father was carted off to prison in Ghana by the president without being tried for anything because of things he said. So I don’t like giving governments the power to lock people up for things they’ve said.

Appiah has spent years answering ethics questions sent in by readers of the New York Times Magazine, things like "can I ban my obnoxious brother-in-law from Thanksgiving dinner?" What use was his philosophical training in answering those questions?

It turns out that there’s a bunch of tools that I have because I can ask questions in a systematic way. Taking them in chronological order, there’s a Confucius question — which is, what are the relationships? What duties arise out of the relationships? There’s an Aristotle question: What would a virtuous person do? There’s a Kantian question: What are the rights and duties? And there’s a Millian utilitarian question: What are the consequences for human welfare? If you answer those questions, you’ve often focused on all the relevant stuff.

And on the question of what discipline he thinks he practices, since he has published in philosophy, African studies, race relations, history, and more:

I think of myself as an intellectual, as someone who wants to understand things.

What a remarkable man.

The Persistent Fantasy of Rural Escape

I spent some time staring at this awful thing, wondering why it struck such a chord in me. It isn't because it's stupid. It's because it is *timelessly* stupid. It's just the contemporary white nationalist version of one of our most ancient dreams.

In the 1960s and 1970s we had the hippie version. I grew up with songs like this:

Baby I'll be there to take your hand
Baby I'll be there to share the land
that they'll be giving away
when we all live together.

(Who are "they"? And why are they giving away land?)

But it goes much farther back than that.

Marie Antoinette, queen of France, spent many hours playing at being a shepherdess, and she had a whole fake village built where she could act out her fantasies.

Thomas Cole, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1836

Pastoral poetry that evokes the simple pleasures of rural life is one of our oldest literary traditions; the earliest known examples are written in Sumerian.

Here is a famous example by Christopher Marlowe:

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

It seems that the high-pressure life of an old royal court, full of politics and intrigue that might end with a knife in your back, encouraged the fantasy that shepherds had a better kind of life.

But it's all nonsense. Simple rural life is hard even for people who grew up with it, and it is almost impossible for those who did not. I have a friend who actually spent some time on a hippie commune, and she once said to me, "You know, there are reasons why we all left."

Lots of reasons. The work is hard and unrelenting, with many chores that must be done every single day. The amusements are limited. And the politics of the average commune, while perhaps not as bloody as those of a Renaissance court, can be quite awful. The communes that still endure in our time all have very strict policies about who can join, along with probationary periods and the like, and they still have high turnover.

These days only about 2% of Israelis live on a Kibbutz, and some of these are actually more like gated communities than farming communes.

But when people feel under great social or economic stress, or feel that their beliefs are at odds with those of the majority, or believe that their societies have grown wicked and decadent, these fantasies keep coming up over and over.

Searching for images to put in this post I found all sorts of dumb claims about communal life "going mainstream" in the 2020s. Like this: "Today, it’s not uncommon to see people switching to solar power, growing their own food, or building off-grid Earthships" Unless you consider 0.01 percent "not uncommon," this is utter nonsense. 

But what is indeed not uncommon is fantasizing about it.

My Species

even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening waters
grows tender, grows tender and sweet

patience I think,
my species,

keep testing the spiny leaves,

the spiny heart

– Jane Hirshfield

Is AI getting funny?

 

Gemini 3's response to the prompt, "create a novel and clever and funny Venn diagram." Via Ethan Mollick.

What to Strive For

Socrates:

Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know—that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.

Plato, Meno, Benjamin Jowett translation 

Freddie deBoer against Identifying with your Disability

Cranky leftist Freddie deBoer has had enough of identitarian liberalism. From a piece titled The New York Times Attempts to Bully Elderly People Into the Disability-as-an-Identity Worldview:

I’m not joking! Paula Span has produced this particular bit of scolding for The Official Publication of Liberals Who Occasionally Look Up From Their Crosswords to Disapprove of Everyone and Everything. Span writes

Identifying as a person with a disability provides other benefits, advocates say. It can mean avoiding isolation and “being part of a community of people who are good problem-solvers, who figure things out and work in partnership to do things better”

Of course, you can enjoy those benefits without identifying as disabled, without allowing one unfortunate aspect of your life become an entire identity. But that doesn’t fly in the world of the brownstone liberals who fund and run the New York Times, who seem to believe that there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities.

Here’s the maddening thing about this piece: it quietly smuggles in a worldview that has metastasized across the discourse, a worldview in which the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled. Not, you know, being blind or paralyzed or suffering from dementia or constantly wracked with chronic pain, no, all of that is subservient to the only question anybody seems to care about anymore, the all-devouring question of identity. The whole thing hums along with the cheery institutional conviction that the answer to every human frailty is more identitarian self-labeling. . . .

What’s infuriating is that the disability-as-identity movement now demands not only recognition but participation. It doesn’t merely want a world that accommodates impairments; it wants people to embrace their impairments as the core of who they are, to reorganize their sense of self around deficit, to declare disability a positive good rather than an unfortunate reality that any reasonable society would want to minimize. So we get this bizarre spectacle in which experts scold older adults for not calling themselves disabled, as though the great social failing is insufficient uptake of a label. When you tell people that disability is a proud identity, that it confers membership in a community, that it’s a site of resistance and empowerment, you create a perverse incentive structure: you reward pathology and make recovery, adaptation, or improvement look like betrayal. You create cultures where people compete for diagnostic prestige and moral authority through the performance of malady. You make suffering existentially sticky. The NYT wants you to believe the problem is that older Americans “don’t want to look disabled.” Is that really the problem for that 84-year-old in chronic pain who can barely walk? I think her problem is that she’s in chronic pain and can barely walk, and “identifying as disabled” won’t make the slightest fucking difference in her life. Meanwhile, our problem is that we’ve built an intellectual ecosystem in which more and more people want exactly that, a label, because being disabled has been reframed as a kind of sacred political laurel. . . .

Because behind all of the airy rhetoric about community and identity is a simple material reality: disability is bad. Disability is physically bad, emotionally bad, financially bad. It reduces freedom. It causes pain. It limits horizons. That doesn’t mean people who are disabled are lesser or that their lives lack dignity or value, obviously. It means that which afflicts them actually afflicts them. My controversial, offensive belief is that disability disables! But the new orthodoxy insists that saying so is taboo. The Times piece rattles through endless quotes about how older people need to feel empowered to call themselves disabled, yet never once confronts the obvious possibility that they don’t want to because they don’t want their lives defined by deficit. They want to soldier on, insist they’re that fine, preserve some continuity of self. Is that denial? Sometimes, sure. More often, I suspect, it’s a vestige of self-respect, a refusal to surrender one’s entire identity to the slow attrition of age and disease.

Recall that deBoer has suffered all his life from serious mental illness, but so far as I know has never once publicly used that as an excuse. He has certainly never tried to build his identity around it; on the contrary he has striven for a rational consistency in his positions. He spent years decrying the way wokeness was dividing the left and forcing people into extreme positions, thereby weakening the whole movement. Like everyone else who has ever thought about the problem, he understands that if people on the left want to move America in their direction, they must act together, as citizens.

Winter Solstice 2025

It has been a dark year for many of us, but we can hope the the growing light will shine on better times.

Hell

I just finished listening to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), which I liked a lot. I noted with interest that although James Joyce was considered a very radical writer and a founder of modernism, he based his aesthetic theory on his reading of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Real revolution always draws on tradition. 

Joyce was raised Catholic and attended Jesuit schools but eventually underwent a sort of religious crisis and left the church. His alter ego, Stephen Daedalus, does the same in Portrait of the Artist. Joyce focuses much of the crisis on an annual weeklong retreat the older schoolboys went on to spend seven days thinking about nothing but faith. One day was devoted to the Virgin, one to Angels, etc. And one day to the Last Things: death, judgment, hell, and heaven. Joyce gives us a sermon preached by one of the priests on the horrors of hell that fills several pages of text. A sample:

Now let us try for a moment to realise, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. . . .

—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. . . .

—But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property that it preserves that which it burns and though it rages with incredible intensity it rages for ever.

This is fiction, but all of this is, as Joyce tells us, taken from actual medieval and Renaissance theologians. The church really taught that this was the fate of all who died in mortal sin, so not just serial killers but anyone who masturbated or indulged in anger.

And this is where Christianity lost me. I want no part of a God who punishes. I know that these days there is much talk of hell as just being bad because you are deprived of God's presence or what have you. But I'm not having that, either; if God can fix us, he should, and if he can't he should let us disappear from the world.

The spirit of vengeance is contrary to everything I regard as holy, and I hate it.

Education and Ideological Variance

Interesting British finding about how people vary within the left or right by education. In this poll, economic views vary across the horizontal line, while social views vary vertically. Leftists broadly agree about economics, but vary a lot on social issues; more educated leftists are generally more socially liberal than less-educated leftists.

Among conservatives (the blue dots across the top), there is much agreement about social issues. The variance is mainly about economic issues, with more educated rightists having more conservative economic views.

In this poll many less educated Brits of the left and right are in the upper left political quadrant, socially conservative and economically liberal. But there is no strong party representing that position because party leaders are drawn from the college educated, who are in the lower left or upper right quadrant.

Via Tom Harwood on Twitter/X.

Law-Abiding Immigrants

Abstract of a new paper:

We provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870–2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants' incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated (30 percent relative to US-born Whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline is part of a broader divergence of outcomes between less-educated immigrants and their US-born counterparts.

Just one study, but all the data I have seen confirms this. 

Links 19 December 2025

Roman rock crystal ring, c. 100 AD

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

More on Roman concrete, based on the study of a building site at Pompeii. (News story, technical article)

A claim that in 2024, the EU earned more from fines on American tech companies than by taxing European tech firms. (Twitter/X)

Nate Silver on the Democratic counterpart of the Tea Party, Heather Cox Richardsonism.

Growth matters: Alex Tabarrok on what economic growth has meant for the people of India.

Lovely painted tomb from the 3rd century AD found in Turkey.

American refrigerators are bigger, better, much more affordable, and only slightly less durable than 40 years ago. (Blog post, summary on Twitter/X)

The main reason home ownership has declined for Americans 25-34 is that fewer of them are married.

An appreciation of P.J. O'Rourke. Like this writer, I usually found him interesting and entertaining even when I disagreed wtih him. (Everybody will disagree with something he wrote, since he started as a hippie Marxist and ended up a cranky old libertarian. The constant was a deep suspicion of The Man.)

When ICE says they are arresting "the worst of the worst," they are lying.

Hollis Robbins says that nobody cares about the quality of university teaching, and if they did, we would have no way to measure it.

Following the Black nationalist playbook, J.D. Vance wonders if the Biden administration encouraged the importation of fentanyl to kill MAGA people. (Twitter/X) And a longer version, "JD Vance is the White Kendi."

Neolithic dog sacrifice found in a Swedish bog.

Update on Haitian gangs (report, summary on Twitter/X)

Sixteenth-century gallows and several mass graves found in Grenoble, France. A reminder that executed criminals were not buried in consecrated ground, which is one reason why places of execution had such strong uncanny associations.

Detailed study of data from Taiwan (where pets have to be registered) finds that pets do not replace babies; in fact, acquiring a dog makes it more likely that a couple will have a child. I have observed this in my suburban neighborhood of Maryland: most of the young or youngish couples I see walking a dog have a baby within two years.

Sec. Kennedy announces a $1 billion program to install gyms in airports. By one calculcation, that would be enough money to save more than 800,000 lives if it were spent vis USAID. (Twitter/X)

More snow drawings made by walking on frozen lakes.

Most big IT projects still fail, despite people trying to solve this problem for 50 years. The author says AI won't help because it trains on past experience and our past experience is terrible.

Study finds that you will have better luck persuading those who disagree with you by talking about what you hate rather than what you support.

Studying the lost upper floors of Pompeii, with speculation that some villas had tall towers. (English summary, Italian press announcement. From this I learned that in Italian, "super rich" is super ricchi.)

Study finds that Orcas and dolphins cooperate to hunt salmon off Canada's west coast. (NY Times, scientific paper, Guardian)

Introduction to the work of Luigi Pirandello, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 but is now mostly forgotten. Pirandello seems to have become a Fascist because he found the people of his time weak and pathetic.

They're still fighting about whether moderate drinking is good for your heart. My rule of thumb is that is they can't even agree on the direction of the effect, it can't be very big. (NY Times – kudos to their reporter for thinking to call up John Ioannidis; AHA Statement)

Summary of a paper which found that aesthetic considerations drive a lot of Nimbyism. (Twitter/X) Everyone who has followed this blog knows that to me, aesthetics is the key to a lot of housing and other land-use issues.

A claim that a Russian submarine was disabled while in port by an attack by Ukrainian underwater drones. (Twitter/X)

The Generation of Men that Hit the Diversity Wall

On the whole, white men are doing great in America; our unemployment rate is about 3.5% and we have the highest salaries and the most wealth.

But when it comes to a certain set of elite jobs, the number of white men really has declined. If you look, for example, at the staff writers for top publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, there are many fewer white men. Ok, that's fairness. But the changes didn't happen at the top; they happened at the bottom. According to Jacob Savage, that meant that one generation of young white men suddenly found themselves shut out of a bunch of jobs:

The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.

And then 2020 happened, and the wheels came off.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a “reckoning.” The New York Times solemnly promised “sweeping” reforms—on top of the sweeping reforms it had already promised. The Washington Post declared it would become “the most diverse and inclusive newsroom in the country.” CNN pledged a “sustained commitment” to race coverage, while Bon Appétit confessed that “our mastheads have been far too white for far too long” and that the magazine had “tokenize[d] many BIPOC staffers and contributors.” NPR went further still, declaring that diversity was nothing less than its “North Star.”

These weren’t empty slogans, either. In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.

“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling closer to 10 percent of open positions. . . .

In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.

And at the bottom of the ladder:

Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men. Between 2018 and 2024, of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at The Washington Post, just two or three were white men (in 2025, coincident with certain political shifts, the Post’s intern class had seven white guys—numbers not seen since way back in 2014). In 2018 The New York Times replaced its summer internship with a year-long fellowship. Just 10 percent of the nearly 220 fellows have been white men.

In Academia, where professors often teach into their 80s and turnover is thus very low, schools have  to work even harder to achieve diversity:

Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).

According to Savage, it's even worse in Hollywood.

This is just math; if institutions want to shift the racial and gender makeup of their staffs, without firing a bunch of senior white guys, they must shift their hiring of junior staffers strongly toward minorities and women. Which means that young white guys get shut out.

And then they get angry and vote for Donald Trump.

There is no way to shift from a workplace dominated by white men to a diverse workplace without hurting somebody; this is especially true in a stagnant industry like magazine publication or higher education, where the overall number of jobs is static or shrinking. You may think, who cares, we need to achieve greater equality, and if a few thousand white men don't get professorships or plum jobs in journalism, that's a price we have to pay. But, again, since there was no mass firing of older white men, that means the price was actually paid only by a younger generation. And anyone who thinks that wouldn't turn those men against DEI and toward a hard-edged conservatism is living in la la land.

For most Americans, DEI has made no difference whatsoever. But in certain fields where jobs are scarce, it has radically reshaped the hiring landscape, and we are going to be dealing with the political ramifications of that for a long time.

The History of Cats

A big fight has been brewing for years over the history of the domestic cat. One branch asserted that house cats are domesticated version of the North African wildcat (Felis lybica lybica), that they were domesticated in Egypt, and that they spread from there to Europe in Roman times.

But in late years several cat skeletons have been identified in Neolithic sites in Turkey and southeastern Europe, including one on Cyprus dated to 7,500 BC. Another study found that cats from Turkey migrated into Europe with the first farmers.

Now a major genetic study finds that all of those early European and Turkish cats were wild, and that all the house cats in Europe from Roman times onward descend from Egyptian cats.

Which raises interesting questions about the cats found on European Neolithic sites. Presumably they hung around human habitations to eat the rats and mice drawn there to feast on human food stores, and presumably humans tolerated them. So how domesticated were they? Were they like the raccoons that raid my trash, who are not especially afraid of me but are thoroughly wild, or were they tamer? At least one of those Neolithic cats was deliberately buried; was it a wild animal sacrifie, or was someone doing honor to an esteemed friend?

One interesting detail is that some of those Neolithic cats may have had some DNA from Egyptian cats; did that make them a little tamer?

The process of domestication remains one of the mysteries of the human past.